Tonight was the second annual "Teen Science Night" at the California Academy of Sciences, what we believe is the largest teen-led celebration of science in a museum in the country. We welcomed more than 1,000 young people to take over the museum for the night, doing cool science demos, showing off awesome tech toys, dancing in science-y flashmobs, and much much more.
My job was to organize a station for our Digital Learning teens to show off their work and supervise a series of "Lightning Talks" by different scientists. It was a lot of fun, and I got to interact with a ton of awesome teens who love science.
I'm totally wiped out from the evening. But before bed, I had to post a few of my favorite pics from the night that I took.
5:00pm: Neal Ramus, Senior Manager of the Careers in Science and TASC Force programs, welcomes the hundreds of excited youth volunteers to the Academy.
6:15pm: Everyone is scrambling to get their stations set up before the hordes of teens from around the Bay Area invade the Academy. After finishing our set up, here's my colleague Christine and I goofing off with three of our Academy teens staffing the Digital Learning station. The table featured the latest youth-created video game "Mission Fishin."
6:31pm: Doors are open! Here come the teens!
6:38pm: The first three teens to try out "Mission Fishin".
7:05pm: Biologist Liz Carlen describes her fascination with the elephant shrew for the first "lightning talk" at Teen Science Night.
7:25pm: Liz showed off definitely one of the weirdest specimens I've seen in awhile: a dead baby hippo in a jar. Gross and cute at the same time.
8:10pm: Andrea Apodaca describes her work with Western Lowland Gorillas for the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, CA for a packed audience.
9:30pm: After clearing out the teens and loading up our equipment, Christine and I headed out of the public floor. We spotted the Academy's albino alligator Claude nestling with not one but THREE of the alligator turtles in his tank. Looks pretty cozy.
And now I'm going to make like Claude and crash on my regular old cotton pillow for the night. Whew, what an amazing evening!
More of my pics from the evening here.